Here's the story : long before this crap even got its start, before the days its current "stars" were even struggling in the lulzpits of "HBs" and assorted white trash hell, before ViolentAcrez aka Michael Brutsch exploited child pornography to get reddit from being weabo-chan to being myspacei, before your balls dropped, men still fucked women, and women still wenton their knees. Just like today.

And also just like today, boys tried to listen in while men and women did what men and women do, and have been doing, and will keep right on doing forever. Life, it's called.

Whatever it may be called, boys aren't a part of it. But they'd love to be! Heck, they're built to try for it. Perverse like anything that ever came out of the proverbial cooked timber, rather than go for it they instead spend most of their time imagining how it goes privately and telling their peers all about how [they imagine] it is, publicly.

So therefore : long long ago, long before the people who had three years' experience at the time today's experts on the basis of three year's experience were just starting out were just starting out, and before even the people who THEN were "experts", so long ago that the mind boggles, during that unspeakable Jurassic that occured more than a decade ago, before kids had cellphones and back when the WTC still stood... the crowd of boys aspiring to manhood were crowding around some loud teenaged derp. Just. Like. Today.

In that case it was entirely new and novel.ii A never-before seen marvel that some nobodyiii had named Fratire, and which consisted mostly of an obscure blogger named Tucker Maxiv.

Tucker Max is currently trying at the edges of becoming an online scammer "investment expert". That's right : he aspires to be Max Keiser. Before that, however, he was trying at the edges of publishing success, he was aspiring to be some sort of later day Stephen King or whatever. According to him, and according to everyone covering the matterv, he was damned good at it, just about to revolutionizevi everything. He even had a film made, a film which... but let me quote.

Having read the book a couple of years ago, I followed the movie's production blog with great excitement.

Tucker mentioned possible Oscar nomination for the script, more than $200M at the box office and revolutionizing Hollywood.

[...]

Tucker tipped this as a classic of our time. I'm not even sure it would have merited a straight to DVD release. He said it would top The Hangover in both acclaim, artistic merit and box office. Half a billion dollars later, wide critical and audience reception, and marked as one of the best comedies of the year, if he'd put that sentence in the script, it would have been the funniest line in the whole movie.

I had a chance to hear Tucker Max talk about the movie at a screening and he seemed quite confident that it would surpass Wedding Crashers as the highest grossing comedy of all time.

I read many of Tucker's blog entries on the movies website. This was where I first started to wish that this movie would fail miserably. Some of the stuff he said on there (for example, he talked about how this movie should easily top The Hangover in box office revenue) was just ridiculous and showed an utter lack of understanding of the film industry and how movies become successful.

So : I am off to watch this thing, and will give you my full report! Yes I know I'm five years late to the day. I was late for Thucydides, too, doesn't seem to have hurt anything.

———

Yes, that's exactly what fucking happened. There are five thousand other places where failed young adults gather to whine their butthurt to the stars. The difference between meatball wiki, lesswrong, wikipedia, hi5, reddit and the other 4`995 "social" "media" hellholes is simply that wikipedia and reddit used child pornography, and the rest didn't. Consequently, you've heard of wikipedia and reddit. What does that say about you ?

And yes, just like myspace went to shit, reddit is going to shit. For the same reasons, too : cool people don't like it, and there's exactly jack shit the multitudes of uncool people can do in opposition. Which is why it's for sale, by the way. Rich people know this shit, and no, bitching about it won't make any difference. [↩]

Because that actually happens, right ? Kids are innovative and shit, it's not just an unfortunate artefact of their inborn stupidity empowered by their natural cluelessness. [↩]

Ryan Holiday, born '87, self proclaimed "strategist" and whatnot, but otherwise too young throughout for a spot in my harem. And don't even think about raising the objection that "But MP! He's male!" Being phenotypically misshapen does not automatically make one male. [↩]

Maddox's involvement in that crap is best forgotten. While completely untalented and with the voice of a sexually molested poodle, Maddox nevertheless is an intelligent guy that makes solid points and who should generally be heard. Instead of stolen. Fuck you, hottopic. [↩]

In any case nobody in the publishing trade rags ever referred to him as anything other than "New York Times Best Selling Author", which shows you exactly how much US based "journalism" is worth. Seriously, you believed it back then ? It seemed a good idea at the time ? Nobody could have foreseen ?

Think about it, the average dog in Calcutta has more of a backbone than the average "journalist" in the US. [↩]

I'm not sure they called terminal derpititude "revolutionizing" back then. Maybe not just yet. [↩]